Ahmed Hashim's Blog

January 2008 Archives

How popular is Java compared to .Net in Egypt?

1. .net is popular in universities, very easy to learn and TA's can easily work through it. In some egypian universities, you will not find any student know Java. I did a presentation in one of those universities , check this event and see the comments of the students. Another guy telling that his university student also don't know yet about Java.
2. The number of graduation projects being developed by .net is more than those developed by Java, because .net is easy to startup and can make a showy project in less time than other. As a result, guys who developed a graduation project with .net will target .net developer vacancies after graduation.
3. Microsoft supports the universities and provide them with a training material and free license for the software. Sometimes they offer a free training program for all students.
4. Every year, Microsoft make a celebration for honoring the students who have used .net in their graduation projects.
5. The training programs we have by the government focus on .net technologies.
6. Microsoft has an active office in Cairo with 100's of partners. They are doing good marketing for their products.
7. In the companies I know, the .net team usually bigger than the Java team.
8. Microsoft pays attention to the Egyptian market & Middle East, unlike Sun, IBM, Oracle and other Java vendors.
9. Companies can easily find .net developers with differnt skills & experience, while Java developers are not easy to find and hire, speacially the senir guys.

How to make a Successful Java User Group

Mmm, you can ask this question if you have an inactive user group, or when you are going to establish a new user group. How to make a successful Java User Group? After discussing with JUG-Leaders allover the world, and with the support & idea of Aaron Houston, the Sun JUG program coordinator we reached the keys of the success of every java user group. Now I will try to conclude them in points and add my points inside.

1. Ask all members to tell their friends & collegues about your the community.
2. Find a university to sponsor meeting place, else find local IT company. Then invite the university student or company employees to join your JUG.
3. If there is a Sun Local office there and you have a contact person, let them know about your JUG.
4. Make a regural meeting and consider having a senior programmers in your community to make presentations.
5. You can use the presentation which Sun evengelists are giving in the Sun Tech Days program: -http://developers.sun.com/events/techdays/self_paced_labs.jsp -http://developers.sun.com/events/techdays/past_presentations.jsp -http://developers.sun.com/events/techdays/presentations/2006_ZA_JNB.jsp
6. Consider inviting local headhunter or employment recruiting firms to your meetings. Some JUGs let the recruiter pass out their cards for a small donation to the JUG...say $25 - $50 to support refreshments. Some JUGs have been successful in doing this while not allowing the recruitor to disrupt their meetings with high pressure sales pitches about their placement firm.
7. When your JUG membership reaches 50 or so members, contact Sun Technology Outreach. Get on Java.net mailing list; and, they will send you some T-shirts, CDs-software, or Java Brand novelties to raffle off...support your local JUG.
8. Post your meeting and events in the java.net JUGs Community page. (Keeps Sun and potential speakers aware of your JUG events, just in case we have an engineer or evangelist in the area or traveling to that area)
9. Contact your local Universities, particularly the instructors of any Java or OO classes. Offer tutoring help to students who become members. Getting someone to post on the Technology area public boards helps.
10. You can contact Publishers of Java books, some will send you books to pass out during meetings. It helps if you can setup a page to publish Book Reviews. (I make it a requirement to receive a book difficult to enforce but...)
11. Avoid politics between sponsores and head hunting firms.Try to stay neutral.Even though you will see that eventually certain companies will support the JUG constantly.Try to give equal opportunities to all the sponsores, if you have a lots of offers.
12. Try to make good enough events, have experience developers presenting, try to find interesting topics, make polls before the events - tech days asking people about topics . Make a call for presenteres among the JUG members
13. Try to make some kind of service in order to inform the JUG members for Job vacancies.
14. A good site always helps. An easy and flexible CMS system (lots of them in PHP, or Java as well) can make your JUG site more interesting.
15. Be online. Answer emails fast, use IMs. People will never ask you again unless you provide them with fast and positive result.
16. Keep the core leader team of the JUG small. The team needs to be highly motivated and passionate about Java and the JUG. It happens to be more or less 2-4 people.Eventually decisions need to be taken quickly so its going to be a matter of one person sometimes...that is normal. You can see that probably lots of people will get interested in participated or helping though not all of them remain loyal to the core intiative of the JUG.

Interview with JavaLobby

Last week, I had an interview with Geertjan Wielenga, an author at JavaLobby (also Netbeans Engineer ), it was about JUG in Egypt and our upcoming event.

It was a very interesting meeting, Geertjan can speak Arabic BTW:-)

The interview is available on JavaLobby website

JavaPolis, the event which I can't attend

I tried twice to attend JavaPolis but I have a major show stopper, I can't get Visa from Egypt to Belgium. I am not the only case, a sporting club in Egypt lost an opportunity to join a champion in Belgium because of the Visa. Simply the Belgium Embassy in Cairo rejects 95% of the visa applications without any justification.

In this article, they mentioned the case of the "Shotting club" which they lost this champion, the Perelman will investigate in this case to know the reason of this behavior from Belgium Embassy.

I am sure that this will effect the business relations between Egypt and Beljium, the first reaction from the sporting clubs is to terminate the contracts between them and any Belgian company.

About myself, I will not try to attend JavaPolis until it is easy to get Visa.

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